A viable method for continuously manufacturing fiber-optic cable is not known from conventional patent literature. FR patent No. 2,564,987 describes a system in which optical fibers are reeled off from cylindrical fiber reels in the axial direction of the reels, whereby the goal of the invention is to achieve a continuous fiber-optic cable manufacturing process by way of splicing the tail of exhausting reels to the start end of a new reel during the process. This method does not make use of an fiber buffer, but instead, the fiber reserve is located resting in containers which have no capability of active take-up or reel-off of fiber during the splicing operation. This method has a number of serious disadvantages. For instance, the fiber reels received from the fiber supplier must be unwound and re-coiled into the containers, which is a time-consuming step. A more serious complication is related to the fiber reel-off direction. Namely, the reeling-off of the fiber in the axial direction of the reel can cause sticking of the fiber between the underlaying fiber turns that may cut the fiber. Furthermore, this solution has no reliable means of detecting the end of an exhausting fiber reel, and any possible fiber damage during the fiber reel-off halts the entire cable manufacturing process.
The traditional discontinuous cable manufacturing process in turn is hampered by losses through discarded material in the process start-up and shut-down phases, and the long start-up time of the process. Moreover, when a fiber lot is ordered from a supplier trimmed to a specified length, in practice the delivered lot always contains a certain number of shorter fibers trimmed exactly to the specified length, while the other fibers may be somewhat overlength, whereby typically about 7% of the fiber material is lost due to the trimming of the overlength fibers in this conventional process. The shut-down and start-up losses of this process are in the order of a few percent, which causes the overall material loss of the conventional process to be about 10%.